Gloomy Outlook For Console Sales

Thanks to CNET News for their article indicating sales of consoles are predicted to slump until a new crop of machines is introduced. The article references a new survey from iSuppli which "expects [console] sales to be flat for the year and down as much as 10 percent in 2005", and points out that pressure will start to build to introduce next-gen hardware, quoting an analyst as saying "I don't think (that), when the companies developed this generation of consoles, they were prepared for it to be so short."

Comments

Re:Price Cuts

[edwdig]

There's no way Microsoft is project 20-24 million for the year. The Xbox has been out for 2 years already and it's sold maybe half that. Do you really expect the remaining 4 months of the year to equal the sales of the past 2 years? I'm sure Microsoft isn't expecting anywhere near that.

Nintendo only shipped 80,000 units this past quarter because they shipped a huge number right before Zelda came out the quarter before. They expected Zelda to make a huge jump in system sales, unfortunately, it resulted in a barely noticable jump, hence an oversupply of GameCubes.

Oh, take a look at the Japanese sales charts for the past few weeks. PS2 sales have been going down and GameCube sales have been going up. GameCube sales were higher than PS2 sales last week. Oh, and as tends to happen occasionally, the PS1 outsold the Xbox in Japan last week. Although the Xbox did beat the Wonderswan Crystal last week, it still couldn't beat the Wonderswan Crystal + Color models combined.

80,000? More like 800,000

[clu76]

Reuters originally reported that 80,000 figure in early August. They left off a zero. They really sold 800,000.

To quote this article: "Amusingly though, it wasn't quite as bad for Cube owners as Reuters (and subsequently most of the Western world including the surely journalistically watertight BBC) reported - with 800,000, rather than the reported figure of 80,000, Cubes shifted in the last quarter."

It amazes me how uninformed people are about the sales of the Nintendo Gamecube. I sware I think they just want to see the worst happen. Almost every article I read that says the Gamecube is in third place is referring to U.S. sales. World wide, Nintendo is selling slightly more than the XBox. But you never read about the demise of XBox.